Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a political theorist who analysed totalitarianism from the inside of the century that produced it. Born in Hanover in 1906 into a secular Jewish family and raised in Königsberg, she studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg, with whom she had an affair at eighteen, and took her doctorate under Karl Jaspers on Augustine's concept of love. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for researching antisemitic propaganda for a Zionist organisation, released after eight days, and fled to Paris. She worked for Youth Aliyah, helping Jewish children reach Palestine, and was interned at Gurs in 1940 when France fell. She escaped and reached New York in 1941 with her husband and mother. The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, argued that Nazism and Stalinism were a new form of government rather than extreme tyranny: they rest on mass loneliness and atomisation, use ideology to explain everything, and require permanent terror even after opposition is destroyed. The Human Condition in 1958 distinguishes labour, work and action, and treats politics as the space in which people appear to one another and begin something new. She covered Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961 for The New Yorker. Eichmann on the Rise of Evil — published as Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil — described him not as a monster but as a thoughtless careerist who never grasped what he was doing, and it also criticised the Jewish councils for cooperating with deportations. The book cost her many friendships and is still argued over. She taught at Chicago and the New School, and died in 1975.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 1975 CE
- Nationality: German-American
- Roles: philosopher, political_theorist, writer
